Weaving my way…

Aug 10

Weaving in colors is often see in fabrics that I’m attracted to…this is the back of Peacock Gorgeous.

Ever since I went to Girl Scout camp, weaving has always fascinated me, and I suppose it was a natural progression that I begin to incorporate it into my quilts. It’s a fabric manipulation technique that’s very popular now, and something that I want to play with in the Peacock series.

One of the fabrics that’s in my peacock box has all the colors, and an interesting, irregular weave. This is something I’ve had in my stash for a while, and it this is a fabric from studioe fabrics, one of the Jafftex companies. It made a fabulous backing to my Peacock Gorgeous pattern - I was pleased at how well it went with the front.

Color! Movement! pattern - the quintessential busy back!

I began working on fabric weaving the way that I do it several years ago as part of a guild challenge. This was the first time I had experimented with this, and created a ‘made’ fabric which was the jumping off point for the quilt…

The basket weave was something created by weaving the two fabrics together, then cutting our the shape of the basket. This one is a favorite, based on my birthmonth - May.

Once you have gathered the fabrics you want to weave together, I prefuse the entire cut of fabric with Mistyfuse, which is my favorite fusible product. It is particularly well suited to this technique because it’s light enough that you can easily quilt through it once you’ve created your design. I think of it as a made fabric technique, similar to improv piecing.

For this example, I use a teflon sheet as my work surface - when the pieces are finally fused together to create one piece of fabric, I simply release it from the sheet in one piece so that I can use a template - or the cricut - to cut additional shapes. I just cut the individual strands into widths of varying sizes so that you get some interesting effects on the weave. Or in the cricut - I was just playing with basic shapes. I LOVE that offset hexi in the bottom of the photo below. To cut this, I set the Cricut to the cotton setting, and the more pressure setting. This has lots of potential for playing around later this year…